An Explosion of Octarine

Spotted at Slashdot from Zonk:

ultracool writes "Two separate research groups claim to have observed Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in quasiparticles at much higher temperatures than atomic BEC — one at 19 Kelvin and the other at room temperature. The 19 K BEC was composed of half-matter, half-light quasi-particles called polaritons, and the room temperature condensate was composed of 'magnons' (packets of magnetic energy). There is some skepticism among physicists as to whether these really are BECs. If they are true BECs, these experiments are the first evidence of them in the solid state."

Just in case you need a brush up on BEC, like I did, check out the Wikipedia article on Bose-Einstein condensation.

So one can't help but wonder if a BEC at room temperature is a magnetic monopole.

BEC's have some really weird theoretical behavior, being frictionless, they tend to flow out of their containers. Gravity doesn't have much effect on BEC's. They haven't been produced in the past beyond at few thousand atoms at close to absolute zero, so their physical and chemical properties haven't been really studied.

A room temperature BEC is counter-intuitive... but believe it, quantum mechanics is always counter-intuitive. Pretty much you can forget Newtonian physics when you describe this state of matter.

There's another peculiar property of BECs. Atoms disappear in BACs. To quote Wikipedia:

Further experimentation by the JILA team in 2000 uncovered a hitherto unknown property of Bose–Einstein condensate. Cornell, Wieman, and their coworkers originally used rubidium-87, an isotope whose atoms naturally repel each other making a more stable condensate. The JILA team instrumentation now had better control over the condensate so experimentation was made on naturally attracting atoms of another rubidium isotope, rubidium-85 (having negative atom-atom scattering length). Through a process called Feshbach resonance involving a sweep of the magnetic field causing spin flip collisions, the JILA researchers lowered the characteristic, discrete energies at which the rubidium atoms bond into molecules making their Rb-85 atoms repulsive and creating a stable condensate. The reversible flip from attraction to repulsion stems from quantum interference among condensate atoms which behave as waves.

When the scientists raised the magnetic field strength still further, the condensate suddenly reverted back to attraction, imploded and shrank beyond detection, and then exploded, blowing off about two-thirds of its 10,000 or so atoms. About half of the atoms in the condensate seemed to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, not being seen either in the cold remnant or the expanding gas cloud. Carl Wieman explained that under current atomic theory this characteristic of Bose–Einstein condensate could not be explained because the energy state of an atom near absolute zero should not be enough to cause an implosion; however, subsequent mean-field theories have been proposed to explain it.



Due to the fact that supernovae explosions are implosions, the explosion of a collapsing Bose–Einstein condensate was named "bosenova."

The atoms that seem to have disappeared are almost certainly still around in some form, just not in a form that could be detected in that current experiment...

Only if you want to believe the law of conservation of mass and energy holds in this bubble of the multiverse.

Just do us all a favor, Zonk, and don't tell Darth Rumsfeld if somebody's really developed a room temperature BEC...